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Wilson's Greenlight Community Broadband Now Serves 10,000 Subscribers

It’s been a little over ten years since Wilson, North Carolina, began offering Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) service to residents and businesses. After a decade of Internet access, video, and voice services, the Greenlight Community Broadband network recently celebrated adding the 10,000th subscriber. Their planned celebration at Wilson’s famous Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park was rained out, but network leaders expect to choose another date in the near future.

We told the story of Wilson in our 2012 report, Carolina's Connected Community: Wilson Gives Greenlight to Fast Internet. The community had approached ISPs serving in the area and asked for better connectivity in order to stay competitive, but those companies didn’t see a financial incentive for investing in Wilson. Rather than take no for an answer, Wilson developed Greenlight for the community of about 50,000 people.

Leaders in Wilson know what they’ve got and have worked to focus on the network’s economic development mojo. They’ve developed the Gig East brand, which brings technology, policy, and economic development to Wilson. Watch the video below about the 2018 Gig East event.

“The benefits to the community have been remarkable, and in many ways are only coming to fruition in the last few years,” [Wilson Chief Operating Officer Dathan] Shows said. “Greenlight has aided in the recruitment of businesses and residents, assisted almost every service provided by the city to become more efficient and effective, provided world-class connectivity to all schools in the Wilson County school system, supported local business and industry and provided a state-of-the-art communications and connectivity infrastructure to every address in the city of Wilson and many in Wilson County.

“As exciting as the first 10 years have been, I am very excited to see what the next 10 years will bring for Greenlight and what additional benefits it will provide to the community.”

More Convos on Greenlight

For more conversations on Wilson and Greenlight, be sure to check out our podcasts with Will Aycock and other representatives from the community:

Episode 291 about the program designed to help reduce Wilson's digital divide

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Removing restrictions on community broadband can expand high-speed Internet access in underserved areas, spurring economic growth and improvements in government services, while enhancing competition. Giving the citizens of Chattanooga and leaders like Mayor Berke the power to make these decisions for themselves is not only the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do.